One continuance had done the trick. I wondered if the two of them would bother to stay in town. Probably, if visions of stardom still stuffed their heads.
I’d sent my $160 invoice to Lauritz Montez’s office, still hadn’t gotten paid. I called him, left a polite message with a machine, and went about forgetting the case.
Lieutenant Detective Milo Sturgis had different ideas.
I’d spent New Year’s alone and the ensuing weeks had been nothing to warble about.
The dog I shared with Robin Castagna turned ancient overnight.
Spike, a twenty-five-pound French bulldog with fire-log physique and the discerning eye of a practiced snob, had scoffed at the notion of joint custody and gone to live with Robin. During his last few months of life, his self- absorbed worldview had faded pathetically as he’d slipped into sleepy passivity. When he started to go downhill, Robin let me know. I began dropping by her house in Venice, sat on her saggy couch while she built and restored stringed instruments in her studio down the hall.
Spike actually allowed me to hold him, rested his cement-block head under my arm. Looking up from time to time with eyes turned filmy gray by cataracts.
Each time I left, Robin and I smiled at each other for the briefest of moments, never discussed what was imminent, or anything else.
The last time I saw Spike, neither the tap-tap of Robin’s mallet nor the whine of her power tools roused him and his muscle tone was bad. Offers of food treats dangled near his crusted nose evoked no response. I watched the slow, labored heave of his rib cage, listened to the rasp of his breathing.
Congestive heart failure. The vet said he was tired but not in pain, there was no reason to put him down unless we couldn’t tolerate watching him go this way.
He fell asleep in my lap and when I lifted his paw it felt cold. I rubbed it warmer, sat for a while, carried him to his bed, placed him down gently, and kissed his knobby forehead. He smelled surprisingly good, like a freshly showered athlete.
As I saw myself out, Robin kept working on an old Gibson F5 mandolin. Six-figure instrument, heavy concentration required.
I stopped at the door and looked back. Spike’s eyes were closed and his flat face was peaceful, almost childlike.
The next morning, he gasped three times and passed away in Robin’s arms. She phoned me and cried out the details. I drove to Venice, wrapped the body, called the cremation service, stood by as a nice man carried the pathetically small bundle away. Robin was in her bedroom, still weeping. When the man left, I went in there. One thing led to another.
During the time Robin and I were apart, she hooked up with another man and I fell in and out of love with a smart, beautiful psychologist named Allison Gwynn.
I still saw Allison from time to time. Occasionally the physical pull we’d both felt asserted itself. As far as I knew, she wasn’t seeing anyone else. I figured it was only a matter of time.
New Years she’d been in Connecticut with her grandmother and a host of cousins.
She’d sent me a necktie for Christmas. I’d reciprocated with a Victorian garnet brooch. I still wasn’t sure what had gone wrong. From time to time it bothered me that I couldn’t seem to hold on to a relationship. Sometimes I wondered what I’d say if I was sitting in The Other Chair.
I told myself introspection could rot your brain, better to concentrate on other people’s problems.
It was Milo who ended up providing distraction, at nine a.m. on a cold, dry Monday morning, one week after the hoax settlement.
“That girl you evaluated- Mikki Brand, the one who faked her abduction? They found her body last night. Strangled and stabbed.”
“Didn’t know her nickname was Mikki.” The things you say when you’re caught off guard.
“That’s what her mother calls her.”
“She’d know,” I said.
I met him at the scene forty minutes later. The murder had taken place sometime Sunday night. By now, the area had been cleaned and scraped and analyzed, yellow tape taken down.
The sole remnants of brutality were short pieces of the white rope the coroner’s drivers use to bind the body after they wrap it in heavy-duty translucent plastic. Filmy gray plastic. Same hue, I realized, as cataract-dimmed eyes.
Michaela Brand had been found in a grassy area fifty feet west of Bagley Avenue, north of National Boulevard, where the streets cut under the 10 freeway. A faint, oblong gloss caught sunlight where the body had compressed the weeds. The overpass provided cold shade and relentless noise. Graffiti boasted and raged on concrete walls. In some places the vegetation was waist high, crabgrass vying for nutrition with ragweed and dandelions and low, creeping things I couldn’t identify.
This was city property, part of the freeway easement, sandwiched between the tailored, affluent streets of Beverlywood to the north and the working-class apartment buildings of Culver City to the south. A few years back, there’d been some gang problems, but I hadn’t heard of anything lately. Still, it wouldn’t be a place where I’d walk at night, and I wondered what had brought Michaela here.
Her apartment on Holt was a couple of miles away. In L.A., that’s a drive, not a walk. Her five-year-old Honda hadn’t been located, and I wondered if she’d been jacked.
For real, this time.
Too ironic.
Milo said, “What’re you thinking?”
I shrugged.
“You look contemplative. Let it out, man.”
“Nothing to say.”
He ran his hand over his big, lumpy face, squinted at me as if we’d just been introduced. He was dressed for messy work: rust-colored nylon windbreaker, wash-and-wear white shirt with a curling collar, skinny oxblood tie that resembled two lengths of beef jerky, baggy brown trousers, and tan desert boots with pink rubber soles.
His fresh haircut was the usual “style,” meaning skinned at the sides, which emphasized all the white, thick and black on top, a cockscomb of competing cowlicks. His sideburns now drooped a half inch below fleshy earlobes, suggesting the worst type of Elvis impersonator. His weight had stabilized; my guess was two sixty on his seventy- four-inch frame, a lot of it abdomen.
When he stepped away from the overpass, sunlight amplified his acne pits and gravity’s cruel tendencies. We were months apart in age. He liked to tell me I was aging a lot more slowly than he was. I usually replied that circumstances had a way of changing fast.
He makes a big deal about not caring how he looks, but I’ve long suspected there’s a self-image buried down deep in his psyche:
Rick Silverman’s long given up on buying him clothes that never get worn. Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high-priced West Hollywood salon. Milo drives, every two months, to La Brea and Washington where he hands his seven bucks plus tip to an eighty-nine-year-old barber who claims to have cut Eisenhower’s hair during World War II.
I visited the shop once, with its gray linoleum floors, creaky chairs, yellowed Brylcreem posters featuring
